


Lass Die Welt Versinken (Let The World Fall Down)

by EllaStorm



Category: The Borgias (Showtime TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, F/M, Reaper!Cesare AU, References to Suicide, Triggers, and hopefully somewhat historically accurate, inspired by a musical of all things, otherwise very canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-06-01 01:30:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15132110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllaStorm/pseuds/EllaStorm
Summary: Cesare’s death in 1507 rips Lucrezia apart at the seams. Locked in her rooms, away from her husband and child, she quietly awaits death. Death, however, turns out to be Cesare, waiting for his other half in between worlds. Going with him to the afterlife would take just one kiss. But Lucrezia is not quite done living…





	Lass Die Welt Versinken (Let The World Fall Down)

The words from the messenger’s lips reach her ears at a slow, narcotic pace, and it seems as if his mouth doesn’t quite move in time with them, a little too fast.

“The Duke of Valentinois, my lady. He was slain on the evening of the twelfth of this month. Near Viana. It pains me greatly to give you this message.”

 _He missed the Ides by three days._ The thought crosses her mind out of nowhere, and Lucrezia can’t feel her feet when she stands up, abruptly, in front of her court. Alfonso stretches his hand out for her, worry in his clear eyes, but she doesn’t grasp it.

“Are you sure?” she hears herself say. Her voice sounds strange to her own ears.

“I’m afraid I am, my lady. I saw him.”

A small sound comes out of her throat; and now Alfonso is standing up, too.

“My dear-“ His voice is soft and warm, and Lucrezia can’t bear it. Without another thought on etiquette she takes flight, down the marble stairs and through the open doors, past the blurred, half-human faces of her spectators.

 

***

 

She doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t see her husband for three days, even though _he_ tries to see _her_ , but she remains locked in her rooms, alone, and ignores him. The silence around her is stifling, and her pain alternates between numb and sharp, rises and falls even after she’s become too weak to cry. It’s never felt quite like this, not with Paolo, not with Alfonso, not with her father, not even with her stillborn daughter more than a year ago. _This_ grief eats her, rips her apart, makes her feel like her soul isn’t whole any more. And maybe it isn’t. The part of her that was Cesare exists no longer.

On the third night on her own Lucrezia has finally descended into numbness, rolled up on the bed, grasping at a pillow, only in her shift that must be reeking of sweat and tears by now. She doesn’t smell it. She might be dead for all she knew.

“Oh, Lucrezia.”

For one second Lucrezia thinks her husband has gotten past the door, readies herself to scream at him through the numbness, but this is not his voice, and a feathery, achingly familiar touch at her cheek makes her head snap up. In the curtain-drawn twilight a tall, dark figure kneels by the side of her bed, and she looks in eyes that are like a mirror, in a face she was never to see again.

“Am I dreaming?” she asks.

Her brother smiles one of the soft smiles that were always only reserved for her, takes her hand and places it on his chest, beneath a wide-cut neckline of white fabric. He’s warm, and she can feel a heartbeat under her palm. She gasps, hope filling her insides stronger and more painfully than hurt ever could.

“It’s you.” She lifts her other hand and touches the side of his face, the length of his hair. Like a reflex, an instinct, she moves in to kiss him – but he pulls away.

“No, sis. No.”

It’s only then that she realises there’s something off about his appearance. His hair is smooth and straighter, not quite as curled as she’s last seen it. He looks younger, more like twenty than thirty. And the clothes he's wearing, a sloppily buttoned-up black soutane over a white shift – she remembers them, from a bright golden day fifteen years ago, when he was chasing her through her mother’s garden after she’d spied on him…

Now he looks at her with something sad in his eyes, and the hope leaves Lucrezia in small trickles. It hurts; and she curls in on herself, turns around so she doesn’t have to see him any more.

“You’re a figment of my imagination. Leave me alone.”

She tries not to, but still she listens, when swift, quiet steps round her bed, then the mattress dips and he lies next to her, his warmth flaring over her skin. Lucrezia feels his arm around her form, his forehead against hers, she even smells his old perfume on him, but she refuses to open her eyes again. If she doesn’t look into his too-young face, she won’t have to remember that she’s dreaming.

“I won’t leave you, Lucrezia. I’ll be near. Always. I promised you, remember?”

She remembers. Oh, she remembers that night. Blood being cleaned off her face, Cesare’s breath at her ear, then his warm lips at her neck, whispering his promise. What felt bittersweet back then has lost all its bitterness now. She would let her brother kill Alfonso one thousand times over, if he touched her like that again.

“You did.” Her arm wraps around his waist, and it seems as if he’s lost his silk soutane on his way around her bed, because all she feels is warm skin through a thin layer of cotton. “I love you, Cesare.”

“I died,” he says, very seriously, but not sadly. More like he’s speaking about an old memory of long-past times.

“Don’t say that,” Lucrezia reprimands him, and unwittingly opens her eyes. Cesare’s youthful face is looking back at her.

“But it’s the truth.”

  
She knows that it makes no sense to talk to an expression of her own delusions, or argue with it about logic and reason, but she can’t stop herself.

“Then how come you’re here?”

Her brother looks at her, and his fingers wander over her cheek. _Why does this have to feel so real?_

“I’m your death.”

  
“My death?” She looks at him incredulously as he cradles her face in his hand. His dark eyes are impenetrable, and he looks somewhat _different_ in the half-light. Still like her brother, but also like…something more transcendent.

_I’m going insane. I’m going insane, locked in my room, crying over my dead brother, hallucinating._

“You’re the other half of me, my love. Our souls are intertwined. When the time comes, I will be the one to lead you to…well, I do not exactly know, yet.”

“The time? You mean… _my_ time. Of…death?”

“Yes, my love,” he gives back, and presses his forehead against hers once more, one hand at the nape of her neck, strong like she remembers it, prompting her to close her eyes again, this time out of pure instinct.

So _what if_ she’s going insane? She finds herself more and more beyond caring. Maybe, even though this is not _really_ Cesare, it could be a sign. An omen. An invitation.

“I should end it, then,” Lucrezia whispers, remembering the beginning of their conversation, and Cesare, so uncharacteristically, pushing her away. “If I kiss you…will it be over? Is that why you wouldn’t let me?”

“You were always clever, sis.”

“Then I want to kiss you, Cesare.” She moves her mouth closer, but Cesare pulls away again, and Lucrezia looks at him, angry.

His expression reads apology, but that makes her only angrier.

“Now you’re running away from me _again_?”

“I’m not running, Lucrezia.” His hand strokes her upper arm, and she spots a carefully guarded desire in his gaze, not unlike the one she saw there when she lay in her room on her wedding dress, all those years back, naked, beckoning him in. She feels herself calm, knowing that this time, too, sooner or later he will yield.

“So what then, brother?”

“I want to, believe me. I want you by my side.” His hand drifts unmistakeably lower, over her breast, her side, her thighs. “And I _want you_.” He takes his hand off her. “But you’re not ready, sis. You have a life to live. Your husband…”

“I don’t love him.”

“Your lovers, admirers.”

Lucrezia thinks of Francesco and Pietro, of the love they proclaim for her in their letters, the tenderness and affection they show her, and swallows.

“Your children.”

  
“Giovanni is thirteen this year…”

Cesare’s voice is full of warmth, once again. “And there’s still more life for you to give. No, sis, it’s too early for you to go. I can wait.”

He gives her a single, tender kiss on the forehead, then climbs off her bed, taking his weight and warmth with him.

“Will you come back?” Lucrezia pleads, something like desperation in her voice.

But there’s only silence.

Her brother is gone.

 

 

***

 

He stays gone.

But when Lucrezia finally leaves her rooms again and resumes her normal life, she actually _wants to_ ; and even though she grows surer over the years that her vision that night was merely her imagination running wild on lack of sleep and food, she’s also grateful.

 _The last gift my brother gave me,_ she thinks, again and again, _was the strength to survive his death._

The years pass and Lucrezia births two healthy sons, only one-and-a-half years apart. For almost a decade, she’s _happy_. Though Francesco is no longer taking her to bed due to a recently developed illness, Pietro easily fills his spot. He is full of life and poetry, and Lucrezia likes to listen to him speak just as much as she likes making love to him. Her third son, new-born Alessandro, sleeps whole nights soundly in her arms, while she, entranced by their beauty, listens to Pietro read his words to her. Thinking of Cesare becomes easier. The hurt never goes away entirely, but the wound has closed up under layers of scar tissue. The only thing that still gives her a stab of fresh pain now and then is the realisation that she’s lost memories of him, that Cesare’s face has turned into a shadow, a phantom, drifting further and further away from her weak, human mind.

Nearly ten years after his death, she sees him again, his appearance too clear-cut to be from her memories, a looming presence in the back of her ballroom, all black leather and smooth hair. Nobody else seems to take note of him; and his eyes are focused on her, soft and with an emotion inside them she can’t quite place.

Alfonso catches Lucrezia, stumbling, with his hands around her shoulders.

“You’re pale, my lady. Are you ill?”

 “No. No. I’m fine.”

She gives Alfonso a fleeting smile, then turns back to where Cesare stood. He’s gone, but his face is burned into her consciousness once again, the features of a prince, dark, powerful, forever young.

During that night, Alessandro contracts fever.

He dies, two days later; and Lucrezia realises what Cesare’s expression meant to say: _I’m sorry._ That’s when she knows she’s been wrong all these years.

Her imagination didn't trick her back then.

So, she starts waiting up for her brother, deprives herself of sleep and food, once again, in hopes he might come back. But even when she’s become so weak she can’t walk any more, he doesn’t show. She screams, she cries, she begs for release from her pain.

Nothing happens.

 

 

***

 

 

Eventually, she learns to live with it. Carries on. Another daughter, another son. She loves them both, but her life doesn’t feel the same any more, like the colour has drained from it. She starts shutting out Pietro, then Alfonso, then her children; and she hates herself for it.

She dreams of Cesare, more and more, these days, his ageless face, his promise to always be near. _A promise you broke, you bastard,_ she shouts at him in her thoughts _. When I needed you most, you weren’t there! You wouldn’t free me._

“I wouldn’t tempt you,” a warm, longed-for voice breathes in her ear; and Lucrezia opens her eyes. Her candle on the nightstand is still burning, she forgot to extinguish it, and an open book lies next to her. Cesare is right there, on the bed, in black buckskin and a white shirt. She feels self-conscious face-to-face with his unchanging youth, when she herself has changed so much, wrinkles and stretch marks and dull grey in her once-blond hair.

“I could have taken a knife and slit my wrists. What would you have done to stop me? I still could, right now. I’m sick of waiting for you.”

“You wouldn’t do that, sis,” he says, and he’s sure.

Stupidly, she starts crying, her fists are hitting his chest in agony and disappointment – _why do you know? why do you always know? –_ but Cesare simply pulls her in and shushes her, strokes her hair and catches her tears with his fingers and lips. His scent reminds her of home, and Lucrezia wants to stay like this, just stay here, with him, for the rest of time.

“Kiss me,” she begs. “Kiss me. And don’t tell me how much I still have to live for. It doesn’t feel like that any more.”

“Your children…”  
“My children would be better off without me! I’m a shell of a woman, Cesare. I’m nothing. It’s like I’m back at the start, I’m turning, and turning, and I can’t seem to find happiness, I can’t even seem to find _myself_. My life as it should be left with Alessandro, and it’s not coming back. Please. Don’t force me to keep being this – this dead, pained creature. I was Lucrezia once. I want to be her again. And I know I can be her with you. But not here, not any longer.”

“Soon, my love. Soon, I promise.”

“How soon?”

He kisses her hair and pulls her close, so her whole length is pressed against his side.

“Soon. I’ll stay with you tonight.”

Sleep overcomes her almost instantly after he says it; and she hasn’t felt this safe in eighteen years.

In the morning she wakes to a cold, empty bed.

_Soon._

 

 

***

 

The birth of her last child is a lot more agonising than her former births, and she feels her strength seeping out of her with her blood. _More blood than usual,_ she thinks, just before she loses consciousness.

When she wakes up her room is empty, and it’s hard to keep her eyes open. She can hear the muffled voices of people arguing on the other side of the closed door, but she doesn’t understand what any of them are saying.

“This is soon, isn’t it?” she says to the ceiling, her voice as weak as the wing of a small bird that hasn’t yet learned to fly.

“Yes, my love. This is _soon._ ” Cesare is sitting on the edge of her bed, a vision, smiling down at her, and somehow she still finds the strength to smile back.

“I think, I’m not quite as beautiful as you remember me,” she whispers, sadly.

His fingers drift over her cheek. “You’re as beautiful as you were, Lucrezia.” The reverent tone of voice in which he says it makes her hands tremble.

“I slept in your arms,” she reminisces, wistfully. “I wished it would never end.”

“It doesn’t have to, now. It doesn’t ever have to end.”

She lifts her arm, burning up all her remaining energy – she won’t need it, anyway –, and puts her hand to the side of his face. “Cesare. Kiss me.”

He says nothing, smiles. Then, finally, after a small eternity of looking at her, he bows down. As his lips graze hers, she feels a sensation like liquid fire spreading through her veins, and she remembers being young, kissing him for the first time, two souls that realise they were only two halves all along. She feels, deep down to her bones and marrow, that wherever they’re going now, this _belonging_ will not fade like their mortal coils, left behind.

 _I’m Lucrezia,_ she thinks.

And then: _I’m his._

**Author's Note:**

> This weekend marked the start of a VERY random obsession for me. Namely, the German-language musical “Elisabeth”, which deals with the life and death of 19th century empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary. It’s extremely emotionally over-the-top, to the point of bordering on kitsch sometimes - and it’s absolutely awesome. 
> 
> The reason I fell in love with it so much was mostly the brilliant idea the authors had to personify death (as a hot, blond, androgynous sex God no less – I’m not even joking), and have Elisabeth kinda … dance with him throughout the whole thing: Asking him in, pushing him away again, being asked in and pushed away by him just the same, until they finally embrace (and kiss – good on you, E). Basically…there’s a concept for fanfiction on a silver platter, if I ever saw one…
> 
> I promptly decided to write said fiction; but I shifted the dynamics away from what the musical does: My Cesare-as-death is much less possessive (even though he was VERY possessive of Lucrezia in life, but it seemed to make sense to have him less so here – given that he has all of eternity to get to her), and, on the other side, Lucrezia-as-Elisabeth is a lot more demanding.
> 
> The title is a lyric from the last scene of the musical; and, translated into English, a wonderful reference to "Labyrinth", too ^^
> 
> Thank you very much for reading!  
> All the love, Ella


End file.
